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September 6, 2009

THE WEATHERMEN















Rich Apuzzo Chief Meteorologist and Chief Operating Officer at Skyeye Weather LLC



I am the Voice of America...

From the beginning, the premise of man-made or anthropogenic global warming was part of a political movement designed to increase government regulation and to push tax dollars toward special interest groups. As Rush Limbaugh pointed out many years ago, the environmental movement is the new home of socialism, although we’re seeing that philosophy being practiced by many outside the movement in the U.S. government…

In the mid to late 1970s we heard about global cooling and scientists were certain that the next ice age was about to begin. You may not recall this, but the cooling was also blamed on man, but not because of CO2. At that time it was particulate, dust, smoke, etc. that we were putting into the air. It was supposed to be dimming the incoming sunshine leading to colder ground, colder air, more snow and ice and a rapid shift into the next ice age, and the cold winters of the 1960s and 70s were a sure sign that the ice age had begun…not quite. A change to warmer summers and winters began in the 1980s and continued through the 1990s, but that didn’t deter the people with a mission to restrict our freedoms, attack capitalism and infuse the American culture with an increasing array of Marxist – Socialist policies.

Climate change and the propaganda supporting it was part of the new “Green Movement”, the next home for the 1960s radicals after the war protests started to fade away in the early 1970s…though the change began on April 22, 1970 during our first “Earth Day”. Not surprisingly, it was a government official that proposed Earth Day and kicked started the environmental movement which has expanded in so many directions today.

Like so many laws and regulations that have shifted our society further from our nation’s roots, on the surface the idea of clean air and clean water was something no one could oppose, and there were many people who believed that this was the true goal behind environmentalism. Who could be against it? Who (politically) could possibly say no to measures that force corporations to use less energy and put out cleaner water and air? Who doesn’t want cleaner cars and more efficient light bulbs? These are all great things, but not when mandated by government. The free market has always been an excellent catalyst for change because it works off of trial and error. If we try a new technology and it falls flat, we move on…we don’t impose it on people despite its potential weaknesses or hazards (compact fluorescent bulbs) and then regulate the old industry out of business. The natural demand for better technology would have produced a growing economy and cleaner cars, fuels, water and air just because the consumer wanted it, and there would have been a gradual shift from the old technology to the new, allowing workers to get educated and assume new roles instead of being cast out as their industry disappeared almost overnight.More...

Earth Day and the environmental movement are all about political correctness and good intentions, but remember the age old saying that “Hell is paved with good intentions”. For a little background on Earth Day and its founder, here is an excerpt from the Earth Day website:

Earth Day -- April 22 -- each year marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970.

Among other things, 1970 in the United States brought with it the Kent State shootings, the advent of fiber optics, "Bridge Over Troubled Water," Apollo 13, the Beatles' last album, the death of Jimi Hendrix, the birth of Mariah Carey, and the meltdown of fuel rods in the Savannah River nuclear plant near Aiken, South Carolina -- an incident not acknowledged for 18 years.

It was into such a world that the very first Earth Day was born.

Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, proposed the first nationwide environmental protest "to shake up the political establishment and force this issue onto the national agenda." "It was a gamble," he recalls, "but it worked."

At the time, Americans were slurping leaded gas through massive V8 sedans. Industry belched out smoke and sludge with little fear of legal consequences or bad press. Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity. Environment was a word that appeared more often in spelling bees than on the evening news.

Earth Day 1970 turned that all around.

On April 22, 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment. Denis Hayes, the national coordinator, and his youthful staff organized massive coast-to-coast rallies. Thousands of colleges and universities organized protests against the deterioration of the environment. Groups that had been fighting against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife suddenly realized they shared common values.

Sound familiar? A government backed movement?

Less than a decade later, the same scientists and movement organizers who blamed man for causing cooling were faced with an end to the cold winters of the 70s and were having to confront the reality of a warmer climate as the sun became more active and a number of strong El Ninos (above normal ocean temperatures) developed in the Pacific Ocean. To fit their agenda, they needed a new man-made cause, and the natural target was big oil, gas and coal…carbon, or more specifically carbon dioxide. However, there were a number of critical steps in going from cooling to warming, and you may be surprised to learn that part of the shift happened overseas under the leadership of a Conservative in England…Margaret Thatcher. This article explains most of it rather well: http://www.john-daly.com/history.htm

Then again, she was hardly alone. Here in the United States, the environmental movement and supportive politicians initiated the procedures within the United Nations to create the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Like every story, it is complex and has many layers, but if you read slowly and carefully, and re-read some parts, this article really spells out the amazing series of events in our culture that led to the IPCC and the subsequent findings from that panel which guide policy-making today.

http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=157&Itemid=1

However, there have been big changes since the founding of the IPCC…one of the biggest being the World Wide Web, and unlike the 1970s with only the government and left-leaning media for our information, we now have numerous sources of alternative media such as talk radio and thousands of pages of information on the internet. Scientists from all over the world can now communicate immediately online and new studies are published more easily, making them available to the public in minutes instead of printed studies which took weeks or months to be released.

This time around we’re smarter and not being blindly led by the media or environmentalists and we’re pushing back…standing up for science and common sense. Instead of having to print out long articles, I can simply link you to them for you to read whenever you wish…and that’s what I have done below. I have also listed my favorite websites for getting new information every day. Remember, we now surround them! The environmentalists are right about one thing, we do need a cleaner environment, but it starts by cleaning up the corruption in Washington D.C.

Here are some of the problems with the claims of man-made global warming. We only have about 200 years of good surface temperature data, and the most reliable was from the last 100 years. In other words, we’re talking about 100 years of generally reliable daily data on a planet that’s more than 4 billion years old. That’s less than a blip on the geologic time scale. We couldn’t discern a trend from such a short period if we wanted to, but it gets worse.

Did you know that we’re getting data from only 1/6 the number of reporting stations we had back in the 1970s? That’s right…the surface temperatures used in the global dataset come from just over 1,000 stations now, but back in the 1970s that number was over 6,000! Some stations have been closed but many others are just being ignored, and it won’t surprise you that many of those stations are in rural and colder areas of the world. Check out this amazing animation of the disappearing weather stations.

Here’s more about the missing data: Surface stations are disappearing…


Station Data Missing Worldwide article…

Station Data missing for some NASA stations…

The stations that are still being used are primarily in or near urban areas, so naturally they have higher readings over time since most cities continue to grow and are directly affected by the Urban Heat Island effect. In addition, many stations used in the annual dataset are not properly sited, which means that the thermometers are improperly placed near roads, buildings, and large heating or air conditioning units. Meteorologist Anthony Watts has done extensive research on this problem:

http://www.surfacestations.org/

Not only that, but a much more reliable source of global temperature data (satellites) shows a different picture of the past 30 to 40 years, and more importantly, we’re seeing a departure in temperature trends when comparing satellite data to the biased surface data I discussed above. You’ll also learn more about the disappearing weather stations in this post.

Even with the warm bias and diminishing number of weather stations used in the yearly global survey, temperature trends were not going the way that global warming believers expected, so reports were being released with bad data, clearly favoring an agenda and not the facts, and these reports came from sources we’re supposed to trust, NASA and the National Weather Service (NOAA). Here is one example.

NASA was wrong about warmest years…

In late 2008 we learned that October 2008 was the warmest on record, but then learned that bad data was used to make that claim, which has since then been dismissed.

More recently we saw the same bad claim about global ocean temperatures which were supposedly the warmest on record for July…but now we know better.

Between the short duration of surface station data available on earth (200 years or less in most areas), an even shorter period for satellite data (since the 1960s) and even less time for reliable ocean measurements (1980s for satellite data and 2000 for good ocean buoy data), and now knowing that there are biases in some of that data, we really don’t have a handle on any kind of temperature trend, warming or cooling. Even with tree rings and sediment samples from oceans and lakes the data is sparse for the billions of years leading up to today, but there is something to be learned from the data we have. We know that the planet has been much warmer in the past and levels of CO2 have been much, much higher.

4 Billion Years of Climate Change

Chart showing the warmest years since 1920

A little more about historic CO2 levels

There is even some thought that CO2 Causes Cooling

Knowing that CO2 levels are nowhere close to what we have seen in Earth’s past, and even if we allow that temperatures were rising in the 80s and 90s, and have been steady or falling since 2002, there is so much more to understand about the bad claims being made by the believers and beyond that, there is even more that we simply don’t know or don’t understand.

Here is another claim about man’s effect on climate…the oceans will rise and flood coastal cities. Well, the ocean has not risen in nearly 10 years and the overall rate for the past century is well below the official IPCC forecast, and orders of magnitude below Al Gore’s predictions:

Slowdown in Sea Level Rise?


More on the Sea Level Rise…it is not!

Maldives are not being overrun by sea level rise

The oceans are not rising and our cities will not flood, and speaking of oceans, our hurricanes are not more numerous or stronger as had been predicted. In fact, we’re in our third straight year of below average tropical activity, not only in the Atlantic Ocean, but around the world. Here is the report from 2008.

In a related story, we’re not seeing disappearing ice in the Arctic and Antarctic circles. Here is a recent story dispelling rumors of the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets collapsing. There is even a video showing ice cycles and growth of the ice sheets at the South Pole. Here is a study that shows a predominantly icy period over the past 1 million years across the globe…and we’re headed that way again sooner than you think. The changes at the North Pole are also normal and there have been times in the past with very little ice in the Arctic Circle and times when navigation was impossible. Here is a look back at what the British faced in the 1700s and 1800s. Here are some great videos showing how Arctic sea ice is driven as much by winds as any other force, and you can see the big swings in ice cover since the late 1970s (scroll down to the end of the article). Here is another great video showing ice being pushed from the Arctic Circle into the Atlantic Ocean by strong winds, not warming.

So let’s see where we stand. Air temperatures have been stable or cooling for 7 years, ocean temperatures have varied, mainly due to the influences of El Nino, but we’re seeing no warming. In fact, the Pacific Ocean has slipped into a long-term cooling pattern known as the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and that means our planet’s largest ocean is getting cooler. Sea levels are not rising at any level that we need to worry about, storms are not any stronger or more deadly and CO2 and temperature levels have been much higher in the past. The ice sheets at the North and South Poles are not disappearing (they’re getting larger) and Polar Bears are not declining in numbers…they’re increasing!

Here is a recent article that hits on a number of the topics covered above, and it’s an easy read.

Posted on Aug. 18, 2008

By Joseph D’Aleo, executive director of Icecap

12 Facts about Global Climate Change That You Won’t Read in the Popular Press


And here’s another great article putting the debate in political context:

09/01/2009

Dr. Syun Akasofu: 20 points of context on global warming, politics, and the economy of the world.

Here is the Senator Inhofe (R-Okla.) statement I referred to at the VOA Rally:

08/31/2009


Climate bill delayed and in “disarray”
From the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works


Did you know that the computer models used to generate the future forecasts were programmed with faulty science? They were “too sensitive” to the effects of CO2. Learn more here: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/press/proved_no_climate_crisis.html

Finally, we’re in a period of low solar activity that no one living has ever witnessed. In fact, we’re experiencing the quietest sun in over 100 years and may be well on our way to the next Little Ice Age or even a full-blown ice age.

Here is a page showing the historic tracking of days without sunspots. The chart that really tells it all is “Periods with spotless days since 1849”. As of the creation of this article, we’re in the top 3 with 55 spotless days, and no signs of activity returning. Why is this important? It is important because the lack of sunspots indicates a “weaker” sun, which is putting out less energy. For our purposes it means less radiation for warmth on earth, and significant periods without sunspots in the past were directly tied to much colder periods, including the Little Ice Age, a time which featured at least 3 distinct stretches of a quiet sun. We’re on pace to match those quiet periods, or even set new records for a weaker sun and that may well mean brutal winters, reduced agricultural output, increases in illness and disease, and a much larger demand for energy for heating, especially in the northern hemisphere.

The sun not only provides energy to earth, but the solar wind protects our planet from deep space radiation, most notably, Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs). The weaker sun is allowing more Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) into our atmosphere. The GCRs are not dangerous…don’t worry about that…but they have been linked to an increase in low cloud development. If that’s true, then we can not only expect cooling because of a weaker sun, but more and thicker cloud cover which reflects incoming solar radiation, enhancing the cooling effect over time. You can keep track of the sun’s activity here.

As science finally takes the lead in this debate, you might enjoy this great list of everything blamed on global warming…you’ll be amazed.

One more thing before I let you go. There is so much that we don’t know about how our climate works, and there is probably even more that we don’t know that we don’t know…or more simply, things that are undiscovered, that we don’t realize are missing from our discussions and assumptions and calculations. On that note, did you know that the models being used to predict climate trends are outdated and unreliable? I am not a software expert, but this article is intriguing.

I am learning new things every week from scientists around the world. It is foolish to think that man can control climate on such a grand scale (but not for the lack of trying), and we waste a great deal of valuable time, energy and money trying to find blame instead of following the scientific path to truth. We’ll hit dead ends, sure, and we’ll overturn old thinking, but there is so much more to learn and attempting to make policy that will impact billions of people worldwide is just wrong, unethical and immoral. The movement was never about science, as we now know. It was and is about power, control and a progressive, socialist-Marxist agenda that is determined to overthrow the greatness of the United States and the founding principles. Their determination will fall short because, as Glenn Beck first said, “We Surround Them”! Keep sharing the knowledge and striving for truth good will defeat evil…

Here are some great sites I check almost daily for the latest studies and opinion:

Watts Up With That: http://wattsupwiththat.com/

Climate Depot: http://www.climatedepot.com/

ICECAP: http://icecap.us/index.php

Dr. Roy Spencer: http://www.drroyspencer.com/

Roger Pielke: http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/about_us/meet_us/roger_pielke/

SPPI: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/

Climate Audit: http://www.climateaudit.org/

An Honest Climate Debate: http://anhonestclimatedebate.wordpress.com/

About Richard Lindzen: http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen.htm


This document was prepared by Meteorologist Rich Apuzzo at Skyeye Weather LLC


Rich Apuzzo

Chief Meteorologist

Skyeye Weather LLC


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